The vision of… Hans-Maarten Bais

Hans-Maarten Bais started as an intern at Diana Yacht Design in 1998 and never left. Since eight years, he has been creative director of the company, that is driven by a young team of ten, of which two recently graduated. Bais: ”Young graduates often offer fresh ideas.”

”Diana Yacht Design is a flexible dynamic naval architecture office focussed on yacht design and naval architecture”, Bais describes his company. ”We are specialised in full service and can organise the design of a yacht from a to z, starting with the preliminary design to the detailed drawings, the exterior design, the lines plan and all required engineering plans.” Founded in 1971 by three naval architects – Cor van der Wiel, Joost Beekman and Kees Kolff -, the company name is the abbreviation of Dutch Italian Association of Naval Architects, as in the beginning an Italian partner was also involved. When the company started, yacht building was a very young industry, next to Diana Yacht Design,

there were only a few other design companies. In that time, yachting equipment was developed in-house or by maritime suppliers of the commercial shipping industry, some of them later specialised in yachting equipment. Since a few years, the company has been rejuvenating, the initial founders stepped down and the company has three new, young owners: Hans-Maarten Bais (since 2006), Jerry Lakeman (since 2006) and Bart de Haan (since 2012).

Good cooperation

The company’s core business is motor yachts, up until now 49 vessels were built and number 50 is currently on the drawing table. Bais: ”We have a lot of experience in yachts between 40 and 50 metres, about 60 per cent of our yachts have that length. However, we see that yachts are becoming larger, we currently work on 63 metre and even longer yachts. Therefore we say that we can design yachts between 24 and 100 metres. Our clients find us through their yacht brokers, the client himself approaches us or we are approached by a yard for an assignment. Sometimes it also happens that clients have their own stylists or interior designers and we make sure the client’s design becomes a fantastic and seaworthy yacht which fulfils all his or her dreams and wishes. We have good relationships with several Dutch yacht yards, for example Hakvoort Shipyard, for whom we do the naval architecture of almost all yachts they build. Next to that, we branch out internationally, with a good collaboration with a Turkish yard. From 2005 until 2007 we did a lot of work in Denmark and besides that we had contracts in Canada, Japan, USA, Germany and Sweden as well.”

”Some clients also decide to build a yacht in own management, an example is Heliad II, that was built at Lynx Yachts, a yard founded by her owner”, Bais continues. ”This yard is now building the Yacht X Tender, a support vessel for a yacht that looks like an offshore supplier, equipped with two guest rooms and a lot of deck space for toys, which can also be used as a beach club. The best projects are the ones when we have the freedom to design a vessel from scratch, completely our own design, examples of which are Triple 8, Pamela V and Heliad II.”

Trends in yacht building

Recent projects of Diana Yacht Design include a 61 metre yacht for Hakvoort, Golden Age, with exterior styling of Sinot, that is due for delivery in the summer of 2015, the first vessel of this length for Hakvoort, who recently enlarged their shipyard. This yacht was a big challenge for the design company, as it involved more work, different rules and regulations and bigger equipment, says Bais: ”We learned a lot from designing this yacht and we now use this newly gained knowledge for a new 63 metre yacht, for which we cooperate with designer René van der Velden. This vessel is being built at Hakvoort Shipyard as well. These days, people become more and more assertive, they know what they want and shop around. A request we receive more and more, is that a yacht should have more flexible interior and exterior furniture. It looks like this is a trend within a new generation of yacht owners, a generation that is used to throw things out when they are fed up with it. An example of this is that instead of building in a complete saloon, loose furniture is used which can easily be changed if requested. Of course the biggest current trend of all is that the vessels become bigger, yachts between 60 and 90 metres are becoming the standard. Another important trend we see is that sailing with a yacht should be more and more economical, clients have become more interested in sustainability. Therefore we do more hull research to be able to create more efficient hulls. Winning energy back is also hot, placing batteries in a vessel that are charged when a generator generates too much energy and use this energy during the night.”

Not only the client demands more sustainability, sustainability is also important to Diana Yacht Design. Therefore they cooperated with a university to research the possibilities to make a superyacht sustainable, a project called Diana Navitas, a 63 metre yacht. The research was based on four pillars, focus on low (renewable) energy consumption, for example by placing solar panels, awareness of energy consumption by the owners, reduction of noise, pollution and odour, and the application of sustainable materials. When designing the Pamela V, sustainability on board was taken seriously, it was the first vessel with large batteries and several different configurations were used to make sure the vessel used as little energy as possible. Waste disposal was important as well, a kind of deep-freezer was placed on board that freezes compressed waste to avoid smells and pollution. And that is not all. Bais: ”Next to that, we try to innovate in our production method to make the building process more efficient and less expensive: integrate everything in the vessel in the first stage of the build, which means that the build can be started earlier and done more efficiently and less expensive.”

Peculiar requests

The client is king and wealthy yacht owners often have a lot of wishes regarding their toy, some of which might strike as particularly peculiar. What kind of strange requests did Bais encounter? ”Once we had the request to design a yacht with a beam of 1,600 metres, not a very realistic request to execute. Other challenging requests included a garage on board a 24 metre yacht for a Land Rover Defender and a dining table on a plateau that could be turned to the best available view. To be honest though, we do not get a lot of really strange requests, often mainly the interior of a yacht is very special and interesting. The challenge lies in the fact that we create an one-off, technical masterpiece without it being noticed. Techniques and safety precautions are assumed to be invisible but are crucial for the functioning of the yacht when in use. Our clients are mostly people between 40 and 70 years old with families, they want a solid, good quality yacht with good sailing characteristics, the realisation of a dream. The owner of Pamela V wanted to take a lot of tenders, jet skis and a sailing yacht on board, but all these toys needed to be tucked away, something to think about. And nowadays submarines are very popular. All these toys need a crane to be put on and off the yacht, but also of course this crane needs to be invisibly tucked away in the vessel.”

The economic crisis has hit the yachting industry hard and Russian clients became important to the industry, according to Bais. ”The general trend is to go slowly and that is what we experience as well. Mainly 2008 and 2009 were difficult for us and our challenge was that if you have contracts on which you spend two years and you miss out on one, it means that you loose a lot of turnover. When the economy flourishes, so does the yacht building industry, as a yacht is and remains a toy. We tackled the crisis by being very active, we intensively contacted yachting as well as commercial yards. It turned out that we were mainly known as the company that does complete designs, although we are also able to do parts of a design. We involved our employees and developed a strategy to visit all possible yachting exhibitions worldwide in 2009 to promote Diana Yachting Design, before 2009 we only visited the Monaco Yacht Show. During these exhibitions, we often heard the remark: who are Diana Yacht Design nowadays? We only did very little promotion or advertising in the past, but now it turned out that it worked and we put ourselves back on the map.”

Future focus

In 2010, Diana Yacht Design started to become busy again, mainly due to contracts with yards the company had not been working with before, the ultimate proof for Bais that their strategy worked: ”Therefore since 2009, our vision has been not to sit back and wait until a yard calls you, but actively contact yards and build a relationship with them, that increases your chances. It is a commercial business, you have to work hard and the times when contracts were written on a coaster are definitely over. In the future, we want to position ourselves as an all-round company, we work on complete yachts, but are also available for parts of projects. Marketing is high on the agenda, because the competition is fierce and the world has become smaller due to email and internet, but also that has its advantages, as for us that means the world has become bigger. Our focus is on raising our profile.”

Another focus concerns finding qualified employees, as the labour market is difficult in the Netherlands. ”There was a period that it took about five years to fill a vacancy. Therefore we try to recruit directly from schools,” Bais explains, ”we choose smart guys and train them in-house. Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden started a shipbuilding training a few years ago and we profit from that. Our industry consists of peaks, of course I can get people from abroad, but that is difficult due to the peaks, as you have to take responsibility for your employees, also when times are not so good. However, in the future this might become easier as there are more and more recruitment agencies that provide all kinds of facilities, like housing, for the people they represent. But above all I really hope that we will get more youngsters studying to become a naval architect in the Netherlands. Our organisation is very horizontal, we discuss everything that happens in the company. The atmosphere needs to be good, we do the work together and I think it is important that every single employee wakes up in the morning and looks forward to go to work, as then production is the highest. I give our employees a lot of responsibility, that makes them creative. It needs to be a team that does the work together, that makes a team close. Every year, the whole company goes to the Monaco Yacht Show. If you make a design, you at least need to know what a yacht looks like in reality.”

Gail van den Hanenberg